28th June 2024 | Life at Virgin Wines | 4 minute read
Whilst flying around the world trying new wine seems like the ultimate way to make a living, it’s not all painting the town red. It requires a lot of planning and negotiation to secure the very best blends and vintages for our customers. Dave, our Senior Buyer, is tasked with this very important job, and his latest expedition took him to the Southern Hemisphere.
We reveal a glimpse of Dave’s recent South Africa wine trip to source a year’s supply of bottles – that’s a lot of wine!
South Africa is increasingly giving us fabulous high quality wines that our customers absolutely adore. So, understandably, Dave is always keen to get his hands on delicious new drops from this part of the world. As this year’s vintage was down 25% in total (with white wines being down 35%) due to an unexpected hot spell, the mission to secure bottles felt even more important than usual.
Thankfully, this spike didn’t affect the quality, and Dave was quick to fly out early and get first dibs on all the best wines through his strong relationships with winemakers out there. So, we can still expect the same top drops we have come to love from South Africa. Being in another hemisphere to us, the harvest season and bottle times are different, meaning we can start to see any new wines roll in later in the year.
Dave also went on to visit some new vineyard options, which we can’t tell you much about at this stage unfortunately but keep your glasses at the ready for when we can. What we can tell you is if all goes well, we could have access to new vineyards in cooler areas of South Africa, such as Worcester where the hot spikes don’t affect the vintages meaning more wine for us, and therefore you.
Whilst it’s important to get large quantities of good quality wines at lower prices for favourites such as the Blow Your Socks Off case, Dave has been investigating source bottles for some exciting promotions. We can’t give away too much but there are some truly special gems potentially coming to our line, such as a tasty entry from Wildeberg… but that’s really all we can say!
Any trip to South Africa wouldn’t be complete without a visit to our friends at BrightStart. BrightStart is a charity we work with whose goal is to provide children with a better start to life by providing them with education, technology as well as a whole load of things that we take for granted in our daily lives.
We currently donate money to them each year, but Dave made sure to visit them in person during his last trip. Within the next two years, they hope to increase the number of children they help to 100 and with our donations, which comes from the money you spend on our site, we can help make that happen.
There’s a really important project called the Old Vine Project, OVP for short. It looks to protect old vines in South Africa and stop farmers from digging these up to replace them with high volume new plants.
Virgin Wines already works with producers that use these old vines, so it only makes sense that we should get involved with the project. It wasn’t totally clear on how we could do this, so while Dave was in South Africa he did a bit of sleuth work to see if it’s worth us getting involved. We have no set answer on this yet, but you’ll be the first to know when we do.
We’re super excited about what news Dave brought back with him, and while we can’t tell you every juicy detail, we can assure you that you’ll want to keep your glass half full for what is to come.
